It has always been difficult to do business with SAP. The ERP company doesn’t really know how to share fairly. Many partners and consultants made their fortune with SAP services, but when it comes to a joint collaboration, SAP doesn’t like to share revenue. So, why did it announce the program Embrace at the beginning of 2019, then, if it has no intention of sharing the generated revenue?
Divide et impera
With Embrace, SAP is proclaiming its love for cloud hyperscalers. It wants to make it seem like customers are free to choose any cloud they want, and SAP will support them like it would in its own cloud.
During TechEd 2019, SAP celebrated it’s 11-year partnership with AWS. Former SAP executive Rob Enslin now works for Google. Microsoft agreed to a 70-million-dollar cloud licensing deal. Commendable collaboration efforts on SAP’s part, but by endorsing everyone at once, it only creates a heterogeneous solution landscape, making it even harder for its customers to navigate the already complex cloud computing environment.
Embrace is not what it seems
Furthermore, SAP has always liked to keep public displays of partnerships and sharing revenue separate. This is not only true for cloud computing, as many partners realized with Indirect/Digital Access.
For years, SAP encouraged partners to customize add-ons and Abap modifications. Then, it implemented Indirect/Digital Access – forcing customers to pay high licensing fees to SAP if they wanted to keep their customized solutions.
Embrace could go down a similar route. For years, SAP tried to convince cloud hyperscalers of Hana and S/4. Now that it has succeeded, it’s pushing its own cloud solutions into the market, troubling partners and customers alike.
It seems as though Embrace is more of a marketing campaign for cloud paid for by hyperscalers while SAP is trying to reap the benefits all by itself.
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